I guess much depends on whether we're going to be working with an individual over a period of time and develop them into an accomplished presenter or whether we're working with someone standing trembling in front of us like a gibbering wreck with 5 minutes to go before they're due on stage.



Let's deal with the latter situation first. The usual approach to developing presentation ability, with its emphasis on technical skills is going to be no use to us here. We may well feel that our coachee's Powerpoint is overly busy, their notes a mess and their planned pyrotechnics to create a memorable ending doomed to failure, but it's too late to do much about that now.

If you've read some of my other articles on coaching you'll know that I reccomend the following acronym as a useful questioning framework:

A - Aims - What do you want

R - Reality - What's happening now?

R - Reflection - What do you want?

O - Options - What could you do?

W - Way Forward - What will you do?

This ARROW sequence will prove useful to guide to our nervous presenter although we would not have the time to coach to any depth.

I recommend concentrating on aims, or goals. Let's have our presenter utterly clear on what success in this presentation would be like. If it's winning business from a sales proposition let's help them focus on that, if it's creating a relationship with a group of people they're going to be working with again and again let's help them focus on that. If the aim is simply to survive and get through the experience without being scarred for life, then we can build an aim around that too! Two things become crucial in doing this. Firstly we need to make sure that any aim or goal is within our coachee's control. 'My aim is to make sure they agree to do business with us' is not but 'My aim is to present our proposal in the most positive way@ is. Secondly any aim should be stated in the positive so 'My aim is to present a compelling argument' is better than 'I don't want to stammer and make a fool of myself'.

Where is only a short speace of time in advance of a presentation, creating a well-defined aim increases the chances of success and gives our reluctant presenter something useful on which to focus. I would argue that this is much more useful than criticizing their material or sending them on their way with a glib 'I'm sure you'll be OK'.

When we're coaching over the longer term, we can make good use of the Reality stage by following each presentation attempt with a discussion around what had happened, what had gone well, what had gone less well and so on. We could also employ the Options stage to really think through what changes presenters could make to bring about a different result.